| RingCentral | Not Very Innovative
06/22/2015 - 00:15 | | Good pricing; Offers both PBX and Digital Lines | Customer Service is unresponsive (I have tickets opened from months ago); Their "updates" take features away instead of adding new ones; Reliability is poor at times. | We have been using RingCentral for about 10 years now. RingCentral and GotVMail were the only major players I could remember at the time. Service with RingCentral has been just barely acceptable over the years... just good enough to prevent me from going through the pain of switching our (2) company phone systems elsewhere.
RingCentral has thrown some disruptive updates my way over the years. They used to have a feature that appended the extension number the caller dialed at the end of their caller ID. This feature was removed about 2 years ago, without notice, and all of our employees were very confused for a few days until we reconfigured the system to announce the name of the extension dialed before the employee answers the phone.
A later software update that RingCentral performed disabled the call announce on us. Again after a few days of confusion, I ended up re-configuring the inbound caller ID and announcements. This time the feature did not disappear on us, but the RingCentral update just deleted out settings without warning.
About a year ago, there was a major bug in the system that prompted me to start exploring other services. We have several mobile employees that use their cell phones instead of desk phones. A neat feature of RingCentral plays a recording when a user answers their phone asking them to press 1 to accept the call. This prevents the cell phone's voicemail from interfering if the user wants to reject the call. Well, for a period of about 3 weeks, this feature stopped working- no matter how long / hard we pressed 1 to accept a call, the system would return and say "I am Sorry I did not hear you" and hang up resulting in many missed calls. RingCentral tried blaming our cell phones, then the carriers... I somehow doubt that 3 different cell phones across two different carriers (AT&T and Verizon) experienced the same glitch at the same time. RingCentral never apologized for the problem, not offered a fix, but the problem did go away so I gave up searching for a new provider.
The RingCentral feature set has remained very static over the past 10 years. One key feature I have always wanted is an attended transfer. I also don't like the fact you can't ring an extension for an unlimited amount of time (something I wanted to do for our after-hours support line where extended hold times are common.)
I will probably stick with RingCentral for awhile longer. When I started evaluating other solutions, I realized many other hosted PBX solutions lack some of the most fundamental features we have become accustomed to over the years such as "press to accept" and call-announce. |
| Phone.com | Unique Features / Very Flexible - phone.com
06/23/2015 - 02:12 | | Very Flexible Call Handling and Good Pricing | Customer Support was a little slow to respond. Missing call-screening in Queues. | We have been evaluating solutions to get away from RingCentral for quite awhile. While Phone.com is not perfect, we think it will provide the flexibility we require that RingCentral lacks.
Their call rules are vastly superior to anything else we evaluated. We run (3) companies under the same roof, each with their own auto-attendant. With Phone.com we can have one account and play different greetings based on the number the customer dialed. With other platforms, we would have to sign up for multiple accounts each with their own users and minutes.
Phone.com's call handling is also very flexible. When wait times are exceeded, you can do everything from play a recorded message, transfer to voicemail, or forward to another queue / extension. With most other services, when wait times are exceeded, your options are to send to voicemail or hangup.
A gripe we had was how we couldn't setup call screening on queues... we have a lot of mobile users that use cell phones and the "press to connect" feature prevents the cell phone carrier's VM from taking the call instead of the PBX's voicemail system.
Customer service was okay. We had some issues on New Year's Eve / New Years day that were not resolved for a few days into the new year. While I understand many companies are understaffed this time of the year, I still want to know we have access to 1 24x7x365 support to handle urgent matters. I rate the customer service "okay" because our issue was resolved eventually. |
